Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye. With these six words, Yeats distills the entire philosophy of pleasure into a single perfect stanza. Written in 1912, this brief poem captures something essential about the seductions of the senses: the warmth of wine, the gaze of a beloved, the exquisite moment before it passes. But Yeats being Yeats, there's a wry twist in the tail. The speaker lifts his glass, looks at his companion, and sighs. Is it a sigh of satisfaction or of knowing sadness? Perhaps both. The poem performs its own philosophy, offering us a moment of delight while reminding us, gently, that we shall all grow old and die. It's barely six lines long, yet it contains an entire worldview. For readers who believe that the best things come in small packages, this is Yeats at his most concentrated and charming.